Article Writing for SEO......How Much is Bogus?

I had an experience recently, which may explain why Google seems to be giving less value, in the last 6 months, to links from Articles distributed on article sites.

I have written about a 12 articles in the last three years and posted them to the major article sites. I'm a small time player compared to the prolific article-posters that are out there.

In September, I posted an article to ArticleBiz.com for the first time. Last week, I go back to check the article and all is well. But ArticleBiz also recommends some similar articles about real estate that I might be interested in reading.  There on the list of recommended articles is one with the same title as another article I had previously posted to GoArticles.com back in 2007.... the same title exactly.  What a coincidence, eh?

So I check out the article and it is word for word the same article that I posted to GoArticles.com last year, but the Author listed is not me !

Instead, the author listed is a Realtor in Toronto. I decide to go to her website and let her know that she has plagiarized my article and get this corrected.  Lo and behold, there is my article again, posted on her site, with her listed as the Author.

I contact her and she explains that she hired an "SEO company" to write some articles for her and send them to article directories. They must have copied my article and pasted her name as the author, she says. She agrees to make things right.

So assuming her tale is true, how rampant is this practice?  If I have only posted 12 articles and one of mine has been "hijacked", it must be a fairly common "shortcut" for budding SEO and article-writing hired hands.

Now Google is giving less weight to links from articles.  See the connection?

When we, in the webmaster community, find a perfectly good way to share knowledge and build quality one-way links, somebody comes along within a few years and takes short-cuts and turns something good into something bad (in the eyes of Google), ruining it for everybody.

Do others have similar tales of alleged SEO experts selling there skills to Realtors and then just “cutting and pasting” to collect their fee.  This practice actually has two victims; the Realtor that paid good money for original article writing, and the author that took the time to write and post original content, only to find it reposted with another persons name and link in the “Authors Bio” area.

It seems that posting articles has been a game of diminishing returns for quite a while. The lesson here may be to arm yourself with as much knowledge as possible, and stay current with the ever changing landscape of  SEO. Just like reciprocal linking, by the time the latest SEO "trends" become common practice, they are already on their way to being obsolete.

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